I've been trying to think of a variant way to do a discard attack, perhaps one that differs in strength from, for example, Militia and Ghost Ship. The trouble is that "discard to 4 cards" is often harmless, and "discard to 2 cards" is too brutal. So I was stuck.
My brother came up with a really intriguing idea, though, which uses an Envoy-esque mechanism. It goes like this:
Assassin
$5 - Action/Attack
+2 Cards
Each player with 4 or more cards in his hand reveals all cards in his hand except for one of his own choosing. You choose one of the revealed cards for him to discard.
The idea is that you're going to lose your second-best card, assuming the attacker makes the perfect decision, which, since one card is unknown, may not always be clear.
Initially, we thought it would be somewhat comparable to Militia and priced it at $4. But it's so much more powerful than Militia. The "with 4 or more cards" clause keeps it from getting out of hand with KC or a Village chain, while still letting you play it twice. This might actually still be too strong -- it might have to be "with 5 or more cards" -- but I'm still playtesting.
What's interesting here is that both decisions -- the attacker's decision of what card to discard, and the defender's decision of what card to keep -- are really interesting ones. I like the gameplay for the attacker better than with Envoy. With Envoy, often the decision is too trivial if the player of Envoy is out of actions. If not, it can be a toss-up at times, because the player still probably has several cards in his hand. So does he have a Village to go with the several terminals Envoy drew? Or terminals to go with the Villages he drew? No way to know, but with a hand of 3 or 4 unknown cards, he probably has wiggle room to work with whatever your decision is.
With just one card in the player's hand unrevealed, making these kinds of guesses can be more calculated. If he reveals several terminals, did he save a Village, knowing he'd be able to play two of the remaining ones? If so, get rid of the best terminal. Or did he reveal his very best terminal and doesn't intend to use the revealed ones? If so, get rid of a treasure. It's not a huge difference from Envoy, but the unknown information is smaller and therefore more possible for the opponent to try to make an educated guess about.
Tangential question: What factors go into a decision about whether the player bonus should be "+2 Cards" or "+$2" or something else? Seems like a +card and a +coin are pretty comparable to each other, their relative strength varying from board to board and game stage to game stage. So is that choice fairly arbitrary, or is there a more significant reason than simple variety that Witch has one and Mountebank the other?
